Yeah, better change the "Video Start" thing. It's something I've know about for ages but was always a low priority.

Just want to check, have you used the Skills menu? The button is next to the Teleport button. That's where you get new guns and upgrades. It sounds a like you haven't upgraded your weapons or health.

With weapon switch, what weapons do you have? The way it works is, you have your weapon. Press weapon switch and then you can select a new weapon, then you can swap between them. If you've never used weapon switch before and you're currently using pistol, you'll have pistol set on both slots.

If none of the pickups are working, it'll be because you either don't have any of those guns or you do but the ammo is full. (Or it's a bug, but I'm guessing you don't have any of the guns because it takes a while to build up weapons.)

"E" can't be restricted because of the upgrade where a blast kills nearby thanatoids whenever you use a health pack. It's a cheap upgrade you get very early, and the blast is probably more important than the health.

Edit: There are quite a few buttons, and pressing the wrong one can be disastrous. But that's just a question of how well practiced the person is with the game.

E = Use a healthpack
F = Get navigation path to next objective.
R = Turn on autofire (fire constantly without needing to hold trigger)
C = Use pocket bonus. (Gems/Skulls/Caducues bonuses stored for later use)
X = Create/Use super bonus. (A super bonus is a collection of pocket bonues fused into one big bonus)
Z = Use a smartbomb (Like the health blast, but massively more damage and larger radius.)
T = Activate timewarp. (Enemies slow by a factor of 4, you slow by a factor of 2.)
Q = Gun swap.

It's a lot, but new skills only get introduced at a gradual pace, so the player has a chance to get familiar with these keys one at a time.

I'm probably going to leave the metals and cubemap as is now. Question of preference, sharp reflections everywhere don't look good. Plus the shader is packed out as far as textures go. But I'll keep what you said in mind, depending on other feedback.
Edit: Actually, maybe I will try a higher resolution cube map. Will test.

Has the game been crashing at all? It sounds like the maps ran okay this time.

Last edited by mkultra333 on Fri Nov 23, 2018 9:06 am, edited 1 time in total.

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"In theory there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is." - Psychology Textbook.

- cut about 3 or 4 seconds off the map load time (Switched to a faster tangent generator algorithm for the surfaces that lack tangents.)
- reduced text size of "Sector Completed" and other large text so it doesn't look as stretched.
- fixed "Video Start" so it says "Necro Mutex" instead.

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"In theory there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is." - Psychology Textbook.

Yes I've been upgrading I unloced 3 weapons and maxed the first and upgraded fully health and armour. I have seen the option for damage when using medi pack. I guess makes sence and also you can unlock more slots. It is just me as a player haha

With the weapon switching do you hold Q down? As if I press Q i'm not seeing any weapon selection. Maybe i've just misunderstood the usage.

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There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't...

Just tap Q. And think of it as a "Weapon Swap" rather than a "Weapon Select."

Say you're using a machine gun and tap Q. If you've never swapped weapons before, the other gun will be a pistol, and you'll switch to that. Now cycle the pistol to the shotgun using the mouse wheel, you'll be using a shotgun. Hit Q, and it'll swap back to the machine gun. Hit Q again, and it'll go back to the shotgun.

The main point of the weapon swap is so you can have a special weapon you can jump to quickly if needed, instead of fumbling around with the mouse wheel cycling through them all. For instance, I often put the rocket launcher as the swap weapon so if anything really tough suddenly appears I can quickly swap and blow it up.

I've done an experiment with a higher resolution cubemap, I'm uploading it as beta 1.4.2.

I'm not sure what I think of it. Maybe everything is a little too shiny. Surfaces that were supposed to just hint at a reflection are now clearly showing an environment. And it adds a lot of noise to smaller curved areas. Also makes it more apparent that the cubemap isn't really reflecting the surroundings.

But maybe I'm just too used to the old cubemap. I'll let you have a look and see what you think. I'm uploading the new beta now.

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"In theory there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is." - Psychology Textbook.

Have only had a few minutes to play, but the SSR to cubemap reflection boundary was very jarring, but I see you have now fixed it and it looks way better. I think the SSR blending could do with some work, I appreciate though that is something Ogre needs to do sort. Have not had a chance to use VR yet, so will report back when I do.

I quite like the game play, the green way point marker thing is really nice, I really want to try out some of the other guns, but currently I am impressively rubbish! I have only 2 real comments at the moment:

- Its too shiny! For me everything is way too reflective, and its sometime hard to gauge the environment, also artifacts in cubemaps and SSR are very obvious. If you toned it down a little, or added more variance it would not be so noticeable.
- The font. I dont like it! I feel its too blocky, and make the game look older than it is.

I probably should try and do a better font. I'll look around and see if there's anything I like.

I'm still tweaking the cubemaps and SSR, so I'll see what I can do. It'll probably always be fairly shiny, but I've just changed the cubemap to be more detailed and it makes things shinier still, and I'm not sure about it. Although as you say, it does make the SSR match the cubemap better. Metal surfaces are tricky because if they're shiny but you turn down the reflection they look more like marble than metal.

The SSR probably could use better blending. I was very obsessed with making it fast so I didn't do that much blending. But framerates seem to be pretty good so maybe I should revisit the SSR shader.

Experiments are ongoing.

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"In theory there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is." - Psychology Textbook.

Yeah I agree and see why you went with the lower mip. Wouldn't a gaussian blur produce a similar effect and remove the pixelation your getting?

And now the surfaces are more mirror like I see exactly what I was trying to put my finger on about something else SSR are badly blended. Maybe look at those while surfaces are shiny still easier to see the blending problems.

- Better blending between SSR and cubemap.
- Reflections toned down on some surfaces, especially the floor and some walls.
- New font.
- Fixed some bugs in the leaderboard updating, and added a new leaderboard for sectors completed.
- Minor modifications to pistol and SMG to make them more effective.
- Player now starts game with both SMG and pistol.
- Beginning sectors have more monsters, instead of just 1 or 2.

Update's a bit bigger than the others due to new textures, so it takes 5 or 6 minutes to download.

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"In theory there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is." - Psychology Textbook.

Font looks good and reflection are better. Not sure if it's running faster but I've started to get screen tearing so I enabled v-sync and now I am definitely losing frames. Anyway to turn on a FPS panel?

Sector Complete Screen:

- The bottom box with the buttons the border isn't consistent around it.
- Was thinking an extra bit on this screen showing the next sector so you can just continue. Also a rogue type mode would be good where you just play constantly until you die sorta like, teleport from the sector end directly to the next and upgrades applied automatically. needs a bit more thought but I may as well put it out there

Leader board:

- Time is same for every one
- Hi sector is same for every one

Sector Selection Screen:

- "W" is too low on "LOW AMMO"
- Mouse is doubled up compared to main screen not sure if this is deliberate looks odd.

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There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't...

There is but it also adds a ton of debug info that is extra messed up at the moment because I haven't fixed it to use the new font. But I might add a simplified one that users can enable.

- Time is same for every one
- Hi sector is same for every one

Hmm, so it is. This is the first time I've had a chance to see the leaderboard with someone else apart from me on it. Before you had to reach at least sector 500 before going on the leaderboard, but I changed it so that it takes any level. I'll try and debug it.
Edit: The Rating is correct but the additional data is wrong. Fortunately I can extract that data from the Rating, so I should be able to get it working.

- "W" is too low on "LOW AMMO"

Still a few glitches in the new font, will fix it.

- Mouse is doubled up compared to main screen not sure if this is deliberate looks odd.

I think I know what the problem is, I'll look into it.

- Was thinking an extra bit on this screen showing the next sector so you can just continue. Also a rogue type mode would be good where you just play constantly until you die sorta like, teleport from the sector end directly to the next and upgrades applied automatically. needs a bit more thought but I may as well put it out there

I'll look at the border.

For the continue button, interesting idea. I didn't think people would play one sector after another. I tend to only play sectors that have the right combination of challenges, so that I get maximum reward. I pick sectors that have at least the No Ammo and Min Kill challenges, and usually additionally Mega Thanatoids, Radiation Rooms and Shuggoids, so that my final score is x64, x128 or more. And once I have the ultra skill that extends the time limit, I also add the Time Limit challenge so that's an additional x4. If the map looks fairly simple, not to much branching, I'll chuck in the No Nav challenge as well.

I'll see what other feedback I get on the way people play the game. It's interesting to see there might be quite different strategies from my own.

I have considered a mode similar to the rogue-like, also like "ultra nightmare" on Doom. You get one life, that's all (although the "Death Evasion" skill still works, so you can get away with up to 10 deaths in a sector. That probably sounds like a lot, but you burn through them pretty quick once you get up past sector 3000.)

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"In theory there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is." - Psychology Textbook.

Lots of fixes to the leaderboards. They should update better now. Also some minor formatting changes to make the ratings more readable.

Biggest change to the game is the addition of a Permadeath option that can be selected when a new game is started. That means game over if you ever die. (Death evasion skill still works, since the point is that it stops you dying.) Also permadeath games can't be saved, so if you quit it's also game over. This is to stop "save scumming" where the player backs up the saved games and simply reuses the old save when they die.

Permadeath games have their own set of leaderboards as well.

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"In theory there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is." - Psychology Textbook.

Lots of people seem confused by not being able to pick up items. I didn't expect that, since in virtually all shooters you can't pick up items for guns your don't have or for guns that are already fully stocked. But the people have spoken, so I've made it so thanatoids don't drop ammo for guns people don't have yet.

Some VR users select the wrong start configs, either the non-VR standard config or VR configs with settings too high for their system to run. So I've changed the startup dialog to add some extra info suggesting which configs to use.

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"In theory there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is." - Psychology Textbook.

Was set to release on Jan 7 but ran into accommodation problems. Resettled now, and the new release is set for Feb 8.

Thanks to everyone who play tested, especially Zonder. All the feedback from here and other places was very useful. While the core gameplay didn't change, a lot of peripheral changes were made that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise, that have hopefully improved the user experience.